WhatsTheBigData

MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte observed at a recent TED event that “I look today at some of the work being done around the Internet of Things and it’s kind of tragically pathetic.”

The “tragically pathetic” label has been especially fitting for wearables, considered the hottest segment of the Internet of Things.  Lauren Goode at Re/Code wrote back in March: “Let me guess: Your activity-tracking wristband is sitting on your dresser or in a drawer somewhere right now, while it seems that every day there’s a news report out about an upcoming wearable product that’s going to be better, cooler, smarter.”

All of this was going to change when Apple finally entered the category with its smart watch. Many observers hoped that Apple’s design principles, obsession with simplicity, and track record of delighting users with easy-to-use products, are going to finally give the world a useful and fun wearable.

Instead, we got a good-looking wrist-top computer. Not a simple, intuitive, and focused device but a generic, complex product with too many functions and options. Kevin McCullagh wrote in fastcodesing.com: “I can’t help but think Steve Jobs would have stopped the kitchen sink being thrown in like this. Do we really need photos and maps on a stamp-sized screen, when our phones are rarely out of reach? For all the claims of a ‘thousand no’s for every yes,’ the post-Jobs era is shaping up to be defined by less ruthless focus.” Back in June, Adam Lashinsky already made this general observation about the potential loss of the famed product development discipline: “Apple, once the epitome of simplicity, is becoming the unlikely poster child for complexity.”

“Complexity,” however, does not tell the whole story. By introducing a watch that is basically a computer on your wrist, Apple missed an opportunity not just to reorient the wearables market to something much better than “tragically pathetic,” but also to define the design and usability principles for the Internet of Things.

In his TED talk, Negroponte highlighted what he called “not a particularly enlightened view of the Internet of Things.” This is the tendency to move the intelligence (or functionality of many devices) into the cell phone (or the wearable), instead of building the intelligence into the “thing,” whatever the thing is – the oven, the refrigerator, the road, the walls, all the physical things around us. More generally, it is the tendency to continue evolving the current computer paradigm—from the mainframe to the laptop to the wristop computer—instead of developing a completely new Internet of Things paradigm.

The new paradigm should embrace and evolve the principles of what was once called “ubiquitous computing.” The history of that vision over the last two decades may help illuminate where the Internet of Things is today and where it may or may not go.

In 1991, Mark Weiser, then head of the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC, published an article in Scientific American titled “The Computer for the 21^st Century.” The article opens with what should be the rallying cry for the Internet of Things today: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

Weiser went on to explain what was wrong with the personal computing revolution brought on by Apple and others: “The arcane aura that surrounds personal computers is not just a ‘user interface’ problem. My colleague and I at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center think that the idea of a ‘personal’ computer itself is misplaced and that the visions of laptop machines, dynabooks and ‘knowledge navigators’ is only a transitional step toward achieving the real potential of information technology.  Such machines cannot truly make computing an integral, invisible part of people’s lives.”

Weiser understood that, conceptually, the PC was simply a mainframe on a desk, albeit with easier-to-use applications.  He misjudged, however, the powerful and long-lasting impact that this new productivity and life-enhancing tool would exert on millions of users worldwide. Weiser wrote: “My colleagues and I at PARC believe that what we call ubiquitous computing will gradually emerge as the dominant mode of computer access over the next 20 years. … [B]y making everything faster and easier to do, with less strain and fewer mental gymnastics, it will transform what is apparently possible. … [M]achines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”

Ubiquitous computing has not become the “dominant mode of computer access” mostly because of Steve Jobs’ Apple. It successfully invented variations on the theme of the Internet of Computers: The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. All of them beautifully designed, easy-to-use, and useful. All of them cementing and enlarging the dominance of the Internet of Computers paradigm. Now Apple has extended the paradigm by inventing a wristop computer. That the Apple Watch is more complex and less focused than Apple’s previous successful inventions matters less than the fact that it continues in their well-trodden path.

While the dominant paradigm has been reinforced and expanded by the successful innovations of Apple and others, the vision of ubiquitous computing has not died. Today, when we are adding intelligence to things at an accelerating rate, it is more important than ever. Earlier this year, I asked Bob Metcalfe what is required to make us happy with our Internet of Things experience. “Not so much good UX, but no UX at all,” he said. “The IoT should disappear into the woodwork, even faster than Ethernet has.” Metcalfe invented the Ethernet at Xerox PARC at the time Weiser and others were working on making computers disappear.

Besides ubiquity, there are at least two other dimensions to the new paradigm of the Internet of Things. One is seamless connectivity. In response to the same question, Google’s Hal Varian told me, “I think that the big challenge now is interoperability. Given the fact that there will be an explosion of new devices, it is important that they talk to each other. For example, I want my smoke alarm to talk to my bedroom lights, and my garden moisture detector to talk to my lawn sprinkler.” No more islands of computing, a hallmark of the Internet of (isolated) Computers.

Another important dimension of the new paradigm is useful data. Not big or small, nor irrelevant or trapped in a silo, just useful. The value of the “things” in the Internet of Things paradigm is measured by how well the data they collect is analyzed and how quickly useful feedback based on this analysis is delivered to the user.

Disappearing into the woodwork. All things talking to all things. Useful data. It may not be Apple, but the company or companies that will master these will usher in the new era of the Internet of Things where we finally get over our mainframe/PC/Wristop computer habit.

[Originally published on Forbes.com]

There have been visions of smart, communicating objects even before the global computer network was launched forty-five years ago. As the Internet has grown to link all signs of intelligence (i.e., software) around the world, a number of other terms associated with the idea and practice of connecting everything to everything have made their appearance, including machine-to-machine (M2M), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), context-aware computing, wearables, ubiquitous computing, and the Web of Things. Here are a few milestones in the evolution of the mashing of the physical with the digital.

1932                                    Jay B. Nash writes in Spectatoritis: “Within our grasp is the leisure of the Greek citizen, made possible by our mechanical slaves, which far outnumber his twelve to fifteen per free man… As we step into a room, at the touch of a button a dozen light our way. Another slave sits twenty-four hours a day at our thermostat, regulating the heat of our home. Another sits night and day at our automatic refrigerator. They start our car; run our motors; shine our shoes; and cult our hair. They practically eliminate time and space by their very fleetness.”

January 13, 1946              The 2-Way Wrist Radio, worn as a wristwatch by Dick Tracy and members of the police force, makes its first appearance and becomes one of the comic strip’s most recognizable icons.

1949                                    The bar code is conceived when 27 year-old Norman Joseph Woodland draws four lines in the sand on a Miami beach. Woodland, who later became an IBM engineer, received (with Bernard Silver) the first patent for a linear bar code in 1952. More than twenty years later, another IBMer, George Laurer, was one of those primarily responsible for refining the idea for use by supermarkets.

1955                                    Edward O. Thorp conceives of the first wearable computer, a cigarette pack-sized analog device, used for the sole purpose of predicting roulette wheels. Developed further with the help of Claude Shannon, it was tested in Las Vegas in the summer of 1961, but its existence was revealed only in 1966.

October 4, 1960               Morton Heilig receives a patent for the first-ever head-mounted display.

1967                                    Hubert Upton invents an analog wearable computer with eyeglass-mounted display to aid in lip reading.

October 29, 1969             The first message is sent over the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

January 23, 1973              Mario Cardullo receives the first patent for a passive, read-write RFID tag.

June 26, 1974                    A Universal Product Code (UPC) label is used to ring up purchases at a supermarket for the first time.

1977                                    CC Collins develops an aid to the blind, a five-pound wearable with a head-mounted camera that converted images into a tactile grid on a vest.

Early 1980s                        Members of the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science department install micro-switches in the Coke vending machine and connect them to the PDP-10 departmental computer so they could see on their computer terminals how many bottles were present in the machine and whether they were cold or not.

1981                                    While still in high school, Steve Mann develops a backpack-mounted “wearable personal computer-imaging system and lighting kit.”

1990                                    Olivetti develops an active badge system, using infrared signals to communicate a person’s location.

September 1991              Xerox PARC’s Mark Weiser publishes “The Computer in the 21st Century” in Scientific American, using the terms “ubiquitous computing” and “embodied virtuality” to describe his vision of how “specialized elements of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice their presence.”

1993                                    MIT’s Thad Starner starts using a specially-rigged computer and heads-up display as a wearable.

1993                                    Columbia University’s Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre, and Dorée Seligmann develop KARMA–Knowledge-based Augmented Reality for Maintenance Assistance. KARMA overlaid wireframe schematics and maintenance instructions on top of whatever was being repaired.

1994                                    Xerox EuroPARC’s Mik Lamming and Mike Flynn demonstrate the Forget-Me-Not, a wearable device that communicates via wireless transmitters and records interactions with people and devices, storing the information in a database.

1994                                    Steve Mann develops a wearable wireless webcam, considered the first example of lifelogging.

September 1994              The term ‘context-aware’ is first used by B.N. Schilit and M.M. Theimer in “Disseminating active map information to mobile hosts,” Network, Vol. 8, Issue 5.

1995                                    Siemens sets up a dedicated department inside its mobile phones business unit to develop and launch a GSM data module called “M1” for machine-to-machine (M2M) industrial applications, enabling machines to communicate over wireless networks. The first M1 module was used for point of sale (POS) terminals, in vehicle telematics, remote monitoring and tracking and tracing applications.

December 1995                MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte and Neil Gershenfeld write in “Wearable Computing” in Wired: “For hardware and software to comfortably follow you around, they must merge into softwear… The difference in time between loony ideas and shipped products is shrinking so fast that it’s now, oh, about a week.”

October 13-14, 1997       Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, and Georgia Tech co-host the first IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, in Cambridge, MA.

1999                                    The Auto-ID (for Automatic Identification) Center is established at MIT. Sanjay Sarma, David Brock and Kevin Ashton turned RFID into a networking technology by linking objects to the Internet through the RFID tag.

1999                                    Neil Gershenfeld writes in When Things Start to Think: “Beyond seeking to make computers ubiquitous, we should try to make them unobtrusive…. For all the coverage of the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, a far bigger change is coming as the number of things using the Net dwarf the number of people. The real promise of connecting computers is to free people, by embedding the means to solve problems in the things around us.”

January 1, 2001                David Brock, co-director of MIT’s Auto-ID Center, writes in a white paper titled “The Electronic Product Code (EPC): A Naming Scheme for Physical Objects”: “For over twenty-?ve years, the Universal Product Code (UPC or ‘bar code’) has helped streamline retail checkout and inventory processes… To take advantage of [the Internet’s] infrastructure, we propose a new object identi?cation scheme, the Electronic Product Code (EPC), which uniquely identi?es objects and facilitates tracking throughout the product life cycle.”

March 18, 2002                Chana Schoenberger and Bruce Upbin publish “The Internet of Things” in Forbes. They quote Kevin Ashton of MIT’s Auto-ID Center: “We need an internet for things, a standardized way for computers to understand the real world.”

April 2002                          Jim Waldo writes in “Virtual Organizations, Pervasive Computing, and an Infrastructure for Networking at the Edge,” in the Journal of Information Systems Frontiers: “…the Internet is becoming the communication fabric for devices to talk to services, which in turn talk to other services. Humans are quickly becoming a minority on the Internet, and the majority stakeholders are computational entities that are interacting with other computational entities without human intervention.”

June 2002                          Glover Ferguson, chief scientist for Accenture, writes in “Have Your Objects Call My Objects” in the Harvard Business Review: “It’s no exaggeration to say that a tiny tag may one day transform your own business. And that day may not be very far off.”

January 2003                    Bernard Traversat et al. publish “Project JXTA-C: Enabling a Web of Things” in HICSS ’03 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. They write: “The open-source Project JXTA was initiated a year ago to specify a standard set of protocols for ad hoc, pervasive, peer-to-peer computing as a foundation of the upcoming Web of Things.”

October 2003                    Sean Dodson writes in the Guardian: ”Last month, a controversial network to connect many of the millions of tags that are already in the world (and the billions more on their way) was launched at the McCormick Place conference centre on the banks of Lake Michigan. Roughly 1,000 delegates from across the worlds of retail, technology and academia gathered for the launch of the electronic product code (EPC) network. Their aim was to replace the global barcode with a universal system that can provide a unique number for every object in the world. Some have already started calling this network ‘the internet of things’.”

August 2004                      Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling introduces the concept of “Spime” at SIGGRAPH, describing it as “a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a ‘Wrangler.’ … The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story…  In the future, an object’s life begins on a graphics screen. It is born digital. Its design specs accompany it throughout its life. It is inseparable from that original digital blueprint, which rules the material world. This object is going to tell you – if you ask – everything that an expert would tell you about it. Because it WANTS you to become an expert.”

September 2004              G. Lawton writes in “Machine-to-machine technology gears up for growth” in Computer: “There are many more machines—defined as things with mechanical, electrical, or electronic properties­—in the world than people. And a growing number of machines are networked… M2M is based on the idea that a machine has more value when it is networked and that the network becomes more valuable as more machines are connected.”

October 2004                    Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian and Danny Cohen write in “The Internet of Things” in Scientific American: “Giving everyday objects the ability to connect to a data network would have a range of benefits: making it easier for homeowners to configure their lights and switches, reducing the cost and complexity of building construction, assisting with home health care. Many alternative standards currently compete to do just that—a situation reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, when computers and networks came in multiple incompatible types.”

October 25, 2004             Robert Weisman writes in the Boston Globe: “The ultimate vision, hatched in university laboratories at MIT and Berkeley in the 1990s, is an ‘Internet of things’ linking tens of thousands of sensor mesh networks. They’ll monitor the cargo in shipping containers, the air ducts in hotels, the fish in refrigerated trucks, and the lighting and heating in homes and industrial plants. But the nascent sensor industry faces a number of obstacles, including the need for a networking standard that can encompass its diverse applications, competition from other wireless standards, security jitters over the transmitting of corporate data, and some of the same privacy concerns that have dogged other emerging technologies.”

2005                                    A team of faculty members at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Ivrea, Italy, develops Arduino, a cheap and easy-to-use single-board microcontroller, for their students to use in developing interactive projects. Adrian McEwen and Hakim Cassamally in Designing the Internet of Things: “Combined with an extension of the wiring software environment, it made a huge impact on the world of physical computing.”

November 2005               The International Telecommunications Union publishes the 7th in its series of reports on the Internet, titled “The Internet of Things.”

June 22, 2009                    Kevin Ashton writes in “That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing” in RFID Journal: “I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure the phrase ‘Internet of Things’ started life as the title of a presentation I made at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1999. Linking the new idea of RFID in P&G’s supply chain to the then-red-hot topic of the Internet was more than just a good way to get executive attention. It summed up an important insight—one that 10 years later, after the Internet of Things has become the title of everything from an article in Scientific American to the name of a European Union conference, is still often misunderstood.”

Thanks to Sanjay Sarma and Neil Gershenfeld for their comments on a draft of this timeline.

[Originally posted on Forbes.com]

Source: Entrepreneur and Media Lab researcher David Rose talks ‘enchanted objects’

The book on Amazon: Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things